


Cutting Me Open (Then Healing Me Fine)

by Good0mens



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Bottom Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Boys Kissing, Canon Queer Character of Color, Canon Queer Relationship, Erotic Poetry, Existentialism, Fluff and Smut, He has feelings about it, Joe is old okay, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani is an Incurable Romantic, M/M, Mentioned Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Mentioned Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Mentioned Nile Freeman, POV Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Movie: The Old Guard (2020), Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Top Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Well - Freeform, but not as many Feelings as he has about Nicky's cock, did i make climate change sexy? idk, no beta we die like men, there's probably some other stuff too I'm just forgetting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:02:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27204244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Good0mens/pseuds/Good0mens
Summary: Joe presses his lips to the mole beside Nicky’s mouth, and watches as the lines crease a smile across his lovely face. There is blood on their hands, yes, but there is also this – cupped palms that hold the shape of love, the empty divots in the gaps between his fingers that ache to slip between Nicky’s."(The tragedy of King Lear is that he only, wholly, terribly, wanted to be loved.)
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 32
Kudos: 216





	Cutting Me Open (Then Healing Me Fine)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! It's been a minute - let me know if you enjoyed! I'm thinking about making a longer story or series about these two, so watch this space.

The golden glow of the morning stains the sheets, and Nicky’s body beside Joe is a humming siren, sundrenched skin and beautiful eyes breathtakingly bare. The sight Joe is graced with grazes against something heated and heavy in his abdomen.

Nicky is a radiant vision; his lover stretches out, shirt rucking up a little to reveal his soft stomach, and the trail of hair beneath his belly button, the meat of his thighs tempting and supple as they tense and relax.

Joe presses his body close to Nicky’s and noses under his jaw, breathes in the familiar scent of his husband. Nicky fits a hand under his chin and lifts Joe’s face up to press their lips together.

 _How could Booker give us over to them,_ Joe thinks to himself as Nicky kisses him in the warm light, _knowing that the love I have for this man lives in every breath, every word, every move I make._

(The tragedy of King Lear is that he only, wholly, _terribly_ , wanted to be loved.)

And fuck if there isn’t an empty space, still, on the couch where Joe catches himself looking to. There is a part of himself that he doesn’t remember giving away, lost, because he can’t ask for it back.

-

Joe presses his lips to the mole beside Nicky’s mouth, and watches as the lines crease a smile across his lovely face. There is blood on their hands, yes, but there is also this – cupped palms that hold the shape of love, the empty divots in the gaps between his fingers that ache to slip between Nicky’s. 

_(I will carve slices off you for years,_ Merrick had said. Like Nicky was nothing more than a hunk of flesh, like this gift of theirs was the only thing he had to offer.)

His Nicky is made of prayer and unfaltering kindness, of devotion and righteousness. He is careful with his words, but he tells Joe he loves him like he’s breathing it into existence, raw and unfiltered, pouring out from his mouth.

Their lips move together in tandem, stoking a desire in Joe to feel Nicky as close as he can get, to feel Nicky inside of him, bringing him to the edges of coherency. Nicky pulls away from their kiss and shuffles down Joe’s body.

When death and the end of time strips his body of everything that makes it a body, when his heart calcifies and his bones rot into the ground, this will remain.

-

Joe is slowly unburdened by the troubling weight of their recent past, as Nicky teaches confession in the space between his hipbones; Joe discovers transgression and forgiveness all at once like braille across the notches of Nicky’s knuckles, where he clasps Nicky’s hand too tightly.

Nile wears her cross like it’s a shield when Andy is near. Joe doesn’t blame her; Andromache has lived in a time before God and Allah, has walked an earth unrecognisable to them today. How does faith stand up to something like that?

 _(What was it like,_ Joe had asked her once, _to be worshiped as a god?_

 _Unbearably lonely,_ had been her reply, looking longingly to the sea.)

How does Joe know faith, if not by the hands that trail down his back, that soothe him with gentle touches, that hold him close at night?

Nicky’s hands curled around the hilt of his sword, curled around the trigger of a gun, curled around Joe’s cock. With every touch Nicky lays upon his wanting skin, he comes alive. If that’s not godly, then what is?

Nicky kisses a line up his cock, and Joe all but dies, swallowed whole by the pleasure of Nicky’s mouth.

-

Nicky pulls off eventually, and nips his stomach. The bite of teeth, settling warmth against his skin, startles Joe back into the moment.

“What are you thinking of my love?”

Joe has been thinking about _medusas_ , the jellyfish that have existed for 500 million years. The doctor, _Kozak,_ she had diagrams of immortal jellyfish in her laboratory. He’s been dreaming of them, of the little medusa stings Nicky leaves on his flesh - how it sometimes _hurts_ to be held; that particular sharp tenderness of being wholly known and yet still somehow, wholly loved.

Instead of answering, Joe uses their intertwined fingers to guide Nicky’s hand between his legs. He barely mutters out a plead before Nicky’s rolling Joe onto his back, leaving new sweltering marks along his thighs, pressing his finger inside.

-

In November last year, during the drought, mainland Australia forgot to rain for an entire day, for the first time in 137 years. What must that feel like? That salty soiled earth, begging for nourishment, dry and cracked and parched land praying for relief and finding none.

Nicky’s lips meet Joe’s in another downpouring respite, quietly powerful and unbearably delicate. Joe yields easily to Nicky’s insistent tongue, his insistent fingers, enjoys the way the familiarity of this dance becomes new again.

Joe cups the back of Nicky’s neck to keep him close, their breaths intermingling. Nicky’s brows are pinched in concentration, and Joe wants to kiss the old scar between them.

There’s a church choir singing in his chest, an echoing reverence against the thrumming _Nicolo, Nicolo, Nicolo_ beat of his heart, a heart which should be weary with time and loss but remains full of hope and saccharine poetry.

-

Nile has been playing Frank Ocean some evenings - Joe vaguely recalls the heady beat of _Thinkin Bout you_ , as it crooned through the speakers in the kitchen. Remembers how Nicky frowned, a confused tilt to his head.

“Idaho is landlocked,” he’d said, almost to himself, “how does he have a beachfront house there?”

(Later that night, Joe whispered _I’ve been thinkin ‘bout forever_ into Nicky’s ear while Joe fucked him open, and revelled in the way it made Nicky keen and clutch him closer.)

This is their forever, collapsed into a single moment as Nicky pushes inside. Joe exhales out a long moan when Nicky is fully seated, sated and _so full_ he can barely breathe. Nicky drags himself out, hot and slick, before making them one again.

Nicky’s slow pace pushes at something around the edges of Joe’s heart, each thrust coming in time to the steady thud of its beating. With every inhale Joe asks for his love, and with every exhale Nicky gives it to him.

(It has been like this for so long, Joe isn’t sure how he’d breathe without the reassuring pulse of Nicky, beside him, inside him, making love anew.)

-

Joe lets Nicky unravel him until his lungs are ruined for breathing against his parted mouth, his open heart, his splayed palms. Everything is wide open, a gaping void waiting to be filled by Nicky. 

Nicky draws along each ringed layer of Joe’s soul, like it could show him the marks of each time he was hurt, or killed; so he could see that despite all of this, they persist.

Joe thinks about kissing Nicolo under the olive groves in Venetia; thinks about mangrove roots, stilting out of the water, catching the sediment from riverbank; thinks about how perseverance against desolation and ruin is not only human nature but _human/nature_ , a symptom of life itself.

Joe sobs when Nicky presses up against his prostate, tries to arch up into Nicky’s touch. Nicky interlocks their fingers again, drags his cock over that spot once more and captures the sound that tears out of Joe’s mouth.

_(Is this okay yet? Is it okay yet? Are they okay yet?)_

-

The layers of The Grand Canyon have been carved by the persistent water over time, as the plateau rose and rose over thousands of years. The red and orange lines staggered along the ancient formation reveal a memory of where the earth used to be rivers.

Joe’s body remembers the places it used to be something else, too; where a white line should worm its way across the caverns of his gut from the first time Nicky killed him, where a bruise should remain along the crest of his shoulder from Nicky’s mouth, where nail marks should dig into the valley of his metacarpus where Nicky is clutching his hands, fucking him harder. No longer visible, but marred just the same.

-

Outside, death blooms; swirling and suffocating, greens and blues bleed into the water, ravenous algae growing and blooming, devouring everything in its path; expanding industrial developments, sprawling outwards, consuming and devastating; graveyards of synthetic rings, plastic digging into the earth and floating out into the unforgetting ocean. To Joe, progress has never looked so much like decay as it does these days.

But this, here, between them, lingers like the smell of rain after a thunderstorm.

-

When Joe was a baby, his femur snapped. A greenstick fracture, where the bone bends and breaks. Like a green twig will break on the outside when bent. Will splinter, stems coming apart under the twisting, mounting pressure.

(It still aches when it’s cold, like an old heartbreak.)

Nicky undoes their intertwined fingers, then undoes Joe with a hand wrapped around his cock. Joe becomes a silhouette to the desire in Nicky’s eyes; lets himself sink deep into this feeling, lets Nicky’s love thread itself over him, lets it fill up his convent and his crevasses.

Then Nicky’s mouth is back on his, and Joe drinks up that taste; as they both reach their peak, they become lotus eaters, driven to apathy for the world around them, reduced only to this.


End file.
